"Reducing the length of your IDs can be nice, but you need to be careful and ensure your system is protected against ID collissions. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to do in your database layer. In our MySQL database we use IDs mostly as primary key and the database protects us from collisions. In case an ID exists already, we just generate a new one and try again. If our collision rate would go up significantly, we could simply increase the length of all future IDs and we’d be fine."
"Reducing the length of your IDs can be nice, but you need to be careful and ensure your system is protected against ID collissions. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to do in your database layer. In our MySQL database we use IDs mostly as primary key and the database protects us from collisions. In case an ID exists already, we just generate a new one and try again. If our collision rate would go up significantly, we could simply increase the length of all future IDs and we’d be fine."